Linguist George Lakoff on Rationality and Politics

Okay, ordinarily I would excerpt a piece of transcript right about here, followed by my usual "click here for the rest" or somesuch, but there doesn't appear to be a transcript available for this really cool interview. And I'm not willing to do one myself. Instead, I'll tell you what's up with it, and hopefully that'll be enough to get you to watch the twenty minute video I'm embedding below.

George Lakoff is a linguist at Berkeley, specializing, according to Wikipedia, in "the centrality of metaphor to human thinking, political behavior and society." If you ever read Real Art at all, you'll automatically understand why that makes me love him. And this interview doesn't disappoint. Right off the bat he asserts that the Democratic approach to politicking is doomed to failure competing against the GOP propaganda machine (that is, in times when it is unfettered by a wildly unpopular President).

Neuroscience has discovered that, counterintuitively, at least as far as the Democrats go, logic and reason are not dispassionate and abstract: 98% of human reasoning is unconscious and emotional--reasoning is a neural, rather than digital, computation. In short, rationality and emotion cannot be separated. People reason in terms of narrative and metaphor, rather than in terms of facts, and this is where the GOP has its edge. Because of their background in business, and especially in marketing, Republicans have a natural affinity for getting across messages which tap into pre-existing cultural narratives and metaphor--they may be wrong on most issues, but they make what they're saying seem right, because they weave their ideas into our most cherished stories and concepts. Democrats, on the other hand, think they can just appeal to people's sense of reason, and that is as nothing compared to the human power of the right-wing storytellers.

Until the Democrats, and the left in general, can figure out how to do the same thing, to tap into America's cultural consciousness in terms of stories and symbols, they're stuck playing on right-wing turf.

Obviously, this is very exciting to me as a theater artist. Stories, myth, metaphor, all these things may be within the realm of business marketing, but they also belong to artists. You know, people like me. I've long said that ultimately there isn't much difference between art, politics, and culture simply because it seems so obviously true: now I've got some scientific support on this, which makes me all the more determined to make it happen on stage.

Wish me luck.

Some other interesting points Lakoff makes:

* Religion is so successful because of its appeal to narrative and metaphor.

* Color only exists because of our perception. That is, it is a construction of our brains reacting to light

* In 1996 an Italian scientist discovered what are called "mirror neurons," which strongly suggest that empathy and cooperativeness are moral mandates hardwired into our brains.

Anyway, this is fun shit. Check it out. From Air America's the Young Lions, courtesy of AlterNet, via YouTube:



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